Memoirs of an Invisible Man

by H.F. Saint

Publisher:

Dell

Copyright:

1987

Printing:

July 1988

ISBN:

0-440-20122-5

Format:

Mass market

Pages:

458

Nick Halloway is a Wall Street securities analyst specializing in energy
stocks and trying very hard to seduce a reporter for the Times.
That seems to be about the limit of his personal aspirations at the start
of this book: he has a high-paying finance job, and he's finally managing
to get a particularly elusive woman to possibly sleep with him (there's a
moderately graphic scene at the start of the book). But a pretense for
getting away with Anne, an evaluation of a Princeton high-tech lab that
was supposedly working on magnetic containment for nuclear fusion, is
complicated by a protest that Nick has no patience for but which Anne
supports. He ends up staying hidden inside the building, nursing a
hangover and inadequate sleep, while it's evacuated by what he thinks is a
fire drill. When something strange happens to the equipment cobbled
together by a highly eccentric scientist, he's within the radius of an
event that kills the scientist and leaves himself and everything in the
building completely invisible.

This is hardly the first time this story has been written in SF.
H.G. Wells was one of the first, with The Invisible Man, and
Memoirs of an Invisible Man is clearly written with Wells as
inspiration. Saint provides the reader ample clues that he's very
familiar with the original: an invisible cat along with Nick, a fire to
cover his tracks (although Saint adds more complications and motives for
the fire), the surprising difficulty of surviving invisible, and even the
visibility of food in his stomach before it's digested. (Saint makes
rather more of how disgusting this looks than Wells does.)

But Saint does much more than update the story for a modern setting. For
one, Nick is not the scientist, and Saint removes the scientist and most
hope of reversing the process early in the story. He's just some guy who
gets caught in a unique accident. And, second, the antagonist in this
story is not Nick, but rather a secret black ops branch of the US
government, which desperately wants take possession of both Nick and
everything else made invisible in the accident to understand and use what
happened. Most of this book is an extended chase as Nick not only has to
learn how to survive and find food and shelter, but also has to hide his
existence from the world and his location from very persistent and
sophisticated pursuers.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man is a somewhat odd book. It has a
clearly SFnal premise, but the plot (government black ops, secret chases
through city streets, personal antagonism between a creative and flexible
protagonist and a doggedly determined hunter) is all thriller. But,
unlike a thriller, Saint doesn't just use the SFnal idea as a MacGuffin or
as an initial plot impetus and then discard it. The whole book is a
detailed examination of exactly what it would be like to live in New York
invisible, according to the precise definition of invisibility that Saint
sets up. This definition makes essentially no scientific sense, but Saint
wisely never really tries to explain it. Other than that one required
point of suspension of disbelief and all of its associated, somewhat
arbitrary rules, Saint tries to both play the effects straight and
extrapolate as many specific details as he can. That's a storytelling
approach much more closely associated with science fiction than thrillers.

This book is also incredibly detailed. Saint is trying to embed the
reader fully in the situation, and he does that by describing every moment
explicitly and as completely as he can. I can see why this was turned
into a movie, although the movie necessarily had to be greatly abbreviated
as there's way more material here than one could possibly film. Saint
provides a lot of very specific information to build a visualization with.
This is also probably it's largest drawback: while a lot of that detail is
surprisingly interesting, not all of it is, and there were a few times
when I wished Saint would get on with it already rather than describing
yet one more thing. It takes 58 pages to get to the accident and another
75 pages just to get out of the accident site, and the printing of this
book I read had very small print.

The genius of this book, though, is Nick. Rarely have I seen a
protagonist more perfectly designed for a story, or a story carried this
successfully on such a small base of motives. Saint achieves an elegant
simplicity of characterization that's delightful to read. Most
protagonists in books I read are a welter of conflicting motivations to
better simulate the complexity of people, or fall firmly into a typical
heroic mode. Nick is not at all heroic, and doesn't even start the book
with much motivational complexity, but he knows very quickly after the
accident that he has no desire to become a guinea pig in a lab. That's
his motivation, particluarly once Saint knocks him a few levels down
Maslow's pyramid, and he acts on it doggedly and persistently throughout
the book.

Usually a character with that simple of motives would be an empty spot
into which the reader is intended to insert themselves, but Nick isn't
that either. He's the first-person protagonist, he comes across as a
complete and separate person from the reader, and we get to know him well
enough to decide that he's not that likeable of a guy. Or, put another
way, he's a self-centered ass. And yet, the conflict of the book is so
stark, Nick's motivation is so simple and obvious, and the way he goes
about it is so ingenious that the reader is won over completely. This is
one of those subtle and simple things that's hard to notice because the
brilliance of it is how well it gets out of the way of the story and lets
the reader enjoy the action and suspense, but it's much harder than it
looks to pull off.

It helps that Saint is a talented descriptive writer in spots. Most of
the book is straight, clear, but unmemorable description, but Saint has a
subtle, ironic, and mocking tone that surfaces unexpectedly.

"Not at all. Not at all. That's a very sensible question." His
voice was a good octave deeper. "I think I can say that my clients
are pleased with whatever role I have been able to play in their
investment programs."

In a way, these people are telling the truth when they say this sort
of thing. The clients who are still with a given broker at a given
moment in time are invariably people who either happen to be ahead so
far or else don't open their mail.

A more succinct description of survivorship bias would be hard to find.
It helps my enjoyment of this book immensely that Saint needles (or
skewers) the financial industry throughout the story.

He also has an occasional knack for visual description:

Behind the desk sat a woman in her forties whose natural expression of
truculent dissatisfaction had been highlighted with the careful
application of great quantities of makeup.

As one can probably tell from both excerpts, Saint's writing does lack a
bit of polish. There are a lot of extraneous words in this book, which
sometimes robs it of punch and immediacy (although sometimes lets a
particularly apt description sneak up on the reader). Some careful
line-by-line editing probably could have tightened and shrunk it. But
Saint's observational talent still shines through, even when he's taking
not-entirely-deserved pot-shots at liberal journalists.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man is one of those singleton creations
that stands oddly apart. It's H.F. Saint's first published novel, is
deeply influenced with and in conversation with genre (via Wells) but
isn't really a genre novel, has thriller structure without being a
thriller, and is a mainstream description of life in New York except with
a significant fantastic twist. It seems likely to continue to be a
singleton, as Saint made enough money off the book and the resulting movie
to retire in Europe and is apparently uninterested in a writer's life. I
can see why Hollywood grabbed it, but the book is (as they usually are)
considerably better and more thoughtful than the film. Even the romance
worked for me, which is tricky given how unlikeable Nick is and how
unlikely the premise of the romance angle was.

You have to be willing to tolerate an occasionally slow pace, and willing
to enjoy a very detailed attempted extrapolation of what it would be like
to be invisible, but Memoirs of an Invisible Man is, given those
prerequisites, surprisingly good and surprisingly fun to read.
Recommended.